What’s for supper? Vol. 116: Cream of what?

Our week started off not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with a splat. Yarr, they warr pukin’. Only a few kids started throwing up, but we figured it was only a matter of time before the upchuck duet became a whole-family vomit chorale.

The way this goes, though, is that only a few people are sick at a time; so I tried to plan the menu with meals that would be okay for people recovering from a stomach bug, food that people who were perfectly healthy wouldn’t hate, and food that, well, wasn’t red. Because. You know.

So here’s what we had:

SATURDAYHamburgers and chips.
This was, of course, before the plague descended and we still lived like upright men and women.

***

SUNDAYGrilled chicken with salad

No tasty toasted nuts, no stinky cheeses, no dried fruit, no buttery, herbed croutons. Just grilled chicken on greens with cukes.

***

MONDAYCream of wheat, homemade applesauce

I do love filling the house with the nostalgic smell of applesauce as it slowly burbles away on the stove, but I was going to be in and out all day. So I speeded things up by using the Instant Pot . Or so I thought.

I quartered about 12 pounds of apples and cut out the stems and cores, but left the skins on, for flavor and color. Then I put the apples in the pot, filling probably 3/4 of my 8 quart IP (affiliate link!) with about a cup-and-a-half of water. I set it for eight or nine minutes, then did a quick release. There was tons of water left, so I strained that out and kept in a sipping jar, where it was lovely and dusky rose, almost like a light syrup or cider.

Then I remembered I had thrown out my trusty food mill (affiliate link!), because I never make applesauce anymore. So I dumped the apples in a colander and tried to press the applesauce through the holes while straining the peels. That didn’t work. It just made more apple juice. So I thought maybe I could put everything in a blender (affiliate link!) and just maybe blend the peels right it. Then I remembered our blender base is lost. So I put it in the standing mixer with the whisk attachment . . .

At this point, I had used six bowls, eleven pots, two jars, a colander, a blender, a spoon, a spatula, two saucepans, a defibrillator, a whisk, a miniature postage scale, one mug, four duck eggs, and a centrifuge we got at a rummage sale (affiliate link!).

. . . I put it in the standing mixer bowl, I say, with the whisk attachment, and let it go. Believe it or not, this worked, sort of. The whisk gathered in most of the peels and trapped them inside itself, leaving beautiful pink fragrant applesauce for my poor sick children. I stirred in a bit of butter and some cinnamon. I took the whisk and retreated to my bed, where I ate all the hot peels because I was feeling sad.

We also had cream of wheat.

***

TUESDAYFrench toast casserole.

I had purposely bought lots of extra bread. I didn’t follow a recipe, but just tore up a few loaves, then beat up a bunch of eggs and milk, added sugar and vanilla, stirred the egg stuff into the bread, put it in a buttered pan, sprinkled sugar and cinnamon on top, and baked it at 350 for 25 minutes or so. They ate a bit of it, the little bastards.

***

WEDNESDAYBeef barley soup, hot pretzels

Beef barley soup would not be a lot of fun to clean up if someone threw it up, but at least it’s not a cream soup. I was in a hurry, so I chunked everything in at once: Cubed beef, diced carrots and onions, salt, pepper, minced garlic, olive oil. A little browning, then I added a whole lot of beef broth, somewhat less red wine, a few cans of diced tomatoes and juice, and a bunch of sliced mushrooms. Then I let it simmer on the “slow cook” setting of the Instant Pot.

When it was almost supper, I opened it, added in a pouch of mixed grains (I think it was barley, spelt, farro, and bunk, and fwap) and set the IP to “high” for eleven minutes. Just totally winging it. I don’t know how to use that thing. It cooked the soup.

***

THURSDAY
At this point, I noticed that nobody had really gotten sick. Just a couple of jerks throwing up early on for no reason at all. We had chicken burgers and mashed potatoes and frozen vegetables. They made snowmen with the mashed potatoes. What did I care?

***

FRIDAYI suppose mac and cheese. I have to return that defibrillator I borrowed, though.

We did the stomach bug thing right before Christmas; this one had an incubation period of about 3 days, so I’d keep getting my hopes up that we were done, and then someone else would go down. I must say, I read Danielle Bean’s tip some ten years ago to pay kids for hitting the toilet or bucket rather than bed or floor and that is some of the best money we’ve ever spent.
Sat: tacos, even though it wasn’t Tuesday
Sun: homemade pizza for lots of people who came over to play Brackets, which was every family making a list of 16 things (some had a theme, some were random) and then we made bracket posters and voted (teeth or the color blue? Saskatchewan or my mom’s car?) Good times.
Mon: deer stew and chocolate chip muffins.
Tues: husband took his Confirmation candidate out to holy hour and dinner, so people here ate the last bits of taco stuff and sandwiches and deer jerky.
Wed: cheeseburger soup and princess muffins (princess emulsion is great for making you feel like you’re eating cake when it’s just an ordinary homemade muffin). Not bad, husband and I thought, but the kids all objected (not to the muffins, just the soup) so that won’t be going in the rotation.
Thurs: two had leftover soup, one had leftover stew, and the rest had poached eggs on toast (“…why do you shiver, with such a funny little quiver?”)
Fri: creamed tuna and biscuits, popular with all.

Glad to hear you’re all on the upswing side of the nausea bug. It looks like you came up with some sane foods for those who weren’t sick, but might be running the risk of becoming so.

We actually did some cooking this week, which since we’re down from six to three people, doesn’t happen as much as it once did.

Saturday was chicken soup day, because that’s when two out of three of us had the tummy bug.
Sunday, I made Barleyburger Stew, which is an old recipe from Betty Crocker’s Dinner for Two cookbook. Served it with salad and bread.
Monday, my husband had a K of C meeting with a meal, so I had leftover stew for dinner. Our daughter, who was just coming down with the bug, had chicken soup.
Tuesday was hubby’s night to cook. He sauteed sea scallops and I played sous chef by sauteeing onions and zucchini slices, and then we cooked a package of California blend frozen veggies for a side. Child ate some but then got sick, probably because she should have stuck with soup at least another day.
Wednesday we had homemade shepherd’s pie with ground beef. There was broccoli as an extra veggie, and sourdough bread. Child said no, thank you, and sipped soup.
Thursday’s meal was Spanish-style boneless dark and light meat chicken over rice pilaf, with a mix of green beans, wax beans, and baby carrots on the side. Child said it smelled bad to her, so she had more chicken soup.
Tonight will be flounder fillets with low-carb veggies and herbs (with a herbs and a little white wine because that makes it taste so good) in parchment packets, and we’ll have salad, and two of us (not me) will have couscous with garlic and herbs. Here’s hoping the sickling is well enough to partake.

I got off easy this week cooking wise because of a power outage and the youngest had the sniffles and today is a birthday and the birthday kid wants to go to Olive Garden. I also made a Millenium Falcon cake so I get kudos for that and I don’t have to make dinner. Is win-win.

Monday night the power went out at 1 am and we have our computers on battery back ups that go BEEP BEEP BEEP until you mute them when the power goes out, so we were woken by that and then I worried for four hours about the house getting cold and the fridge losing all the food, while my husband tried to figure out ways to get power to the fridge that did not involve a noisy generator that would wake the neighbors. It didn’t help that our helpful power company told us our power would go back on at 1 PM the NEXT DAY. Then the power went back on at 5 and we fell back asleep for a couple of hours.

So Tuesday I was running on fumes and I let the kids have a picnic in the living room and yes popcorn is a side dish, what do you want from me? Youngest came down with the sniffles and we had early dentist appointments Wed and Thurs.

Wednesday: Still catching up from Monday night, so I made burgers and hot dogs and frozen french fries. Applesauce and carrots on the side.

Thursday: Youngest feverish, another night of burgers or whatever they wanted from the kitchen.

Tonight is Olive Garden and cake. We already rocked parenting by calling popcorn and movie theater candy “lunch” during The Last Jedi.

Oh, goodness, that’s exactly how our new year started. One kid down, and slowly but surely, every two days a few more would go down. We had empty ice cream buckets and towels strategically placed throughout the house to try to prevent extreme messes. And I still had to clean some rugs when it was all said and done.
Weeks like that are when I thank heaven for teenagers who can corral little ones and feed them while the adults of the house are down for the count.
This week we ate
Sat : homemade pizza, easy and crowd please-er.
Sun: pork roast with boxed mashed potatoes because I forgot to peel the potatoes I’d finally bought. String beans and other vegetables.
Mon: pasta and homemade bread. (Isn’t pasta just like bread? But it’s a different shape so I guess it’s a different food.)
Tues: Taco Tuesday (Thanks Lego Movie!). Also teenage daughter came home as residential high school closed for the week due to flu outbreak.
Wed: we ate something but I don’t remember what. Teenage daughter made homemade monkey bread so no one cared what else was offered. Oh! It was stew with noodles. Very popular, and at least the little kids in the house will eat the carrots out of the stwe if not much else.
Thurs: Teenagers out for work and activities so Little Caesars for most everyone at some point. I had cheerios.
Friday: I think mac and cheese. Plenty of vegetables leftover to use up as well. And if anyone complains, there are plenty of cheerios!